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Our Family took an extended May Long Weekend to go to Spruce Woods Provincial Park in Manitoba. It just so happened to be only 2.5 hours from where we live so no big deal, even with the near 1 year old baby in tow. I brought along my Fuji Film XPro-2 and all three “Fuji Cron” lenses (23, 35, 50 ~ 35, 50, 76). But I shot the whole trip with only the 23mm (35mm) lens. Mainly because I am used to that focal length from my X100s fixed lens camera. But also because I believe that 35mm is the most versatile focal length for travel photography.

What makes Spruce Woods awesome is that it is a gorgeous sandy desert . . . that happens to have an incredible forest of Spruce, Aspen and Juniper trees growing out of it! As I surveyed the landscape, I was bombarded with “How can this place exist?” It seems like a twilight zone time warp walking around there! We took a Belgian horse drawn wagon tour which was really neat and then did some hiking the next day around the dunes. The two main natural attractions are the dunes and the little spring fed lake called “The Devil’s Punchbowl.” But the whole place truly is something to see.

Back to the Fuji kit. The XPro2 is my fav camera of all time. So compact and versatile in and of itself and when coupled with the little 23mm lens offers a perfect mix of portability and capability. I shot primarily in JPG as I always do with Fuji because the files are THAT good. I switched to RAW for a couple shots where I wanted extended dynamic range if I wanted to make a print later. But the JPGs are so brilliant I usually only shoot that format. There’s quite a bit of latitude for editing even the JPGs but I nearly never have to do anything to the files. They come out of camera so, so sweet. Colours are amazing. Detail is crisp and clear. What’s not to love?

So 35mm. It’s truly a versatile place to live when shooting travel (especially with kids in tow). It’s a ‘pretty wide’ way to the view the world without being toooooo wide, although if you were going for straight landscapes you’d want to be wider perhaps. I’d highly recommend this one lens/one focal length approach for your next trip. See what the restriction brings! 😎

We’ve been super fortunate to have this pack of wild turkeys hanging out at our place. They come right into the yard, struttin’ their stuff. They’ve been around for quite a few years but this year they have been really quite prevalent. It made for some sweet photo ops early this morning. I took some shots through window glass and then stalked them out into the back prairie. I was able to get within 10-15′ of the birds which was pretty sweet. 😎

Hey! When winter time rolls around, my cameras basically never see the light of day. If they get any use, it’s all indoors. I’ve got some posts coming up about indoor macro work I have been doing but in terms of getting outside, forgetaboutit! It’s way too cold and miserable for me to mess around with gear.

That said, I couldn’t help myself yesterday. There were the most incredible sundogs I’ve ever seen! It was -50 BillionºC but I ran out with the D800 and 16-35mm f/4 lens. There was this “double rainbow” sundog that I’ve never encountered up above the complete ring around the sun. It was worth freezing my baguettes off! 🤣

They were impressive enough in the landscape orientation but even with 16mm I couldn’t get in that top reflection so portrait orientation won the day! ☀️🐶

So my newborn is like 5 months old. Where did that go?!! And, because she is the 4th child, I basically have no photos of her. LOL. The first kid always has 50 billion photos and the subsequent kids grow up to think that nobody loves them! 🤣 But rest assured baby number 4, we do love thee!

I grabbed the Fuji X-Pro2 and the trusty 50mm f/2 lens and took some candids in the window light. All of these photos are completely unedited, other than the resize for the blog. Fuji absolutely nails skin tones. Every. Single. Time.

I shot all of these images in JPEG and used the various film simulation modes. The warmer ones were Astia and the cooler ones are Classic Chrome. I think the warmth of Astia is a little bit nice for a baby especially one as doughy as my Esther. 😊

I was having some weird focusing issues with the 50mm earlier in the year. It seemed to back focus quite a bit/randomly. I was happy to see that this shoot seemed to nail focus pretty good, yielding some super sharp results at 100% crop. The Fuji face/eye detect setting works surprisingly well and is no gimmick. I’ll be using that setup forever when shooting this lens wide open.

FujiFilm 50mm f/2 at 100% ~ ISO 800 f2.2 1/200

The other thing I love to death about the film simulation modes is ACROS. This yields such glorious black and white images it’s scary. To think that you can get this kind of look in camera with no extra editing? It’s just awesome. I’ve always been a huge fan of ACROS and the really nice “filmic” type grain it has. I setup my Q menu settings with NR -2, Across with a Yellow filter (makes skin glow a bit), Highlight & Shadow Tone -1 and Sharp +1. It seems to yield pretty nice results.

For another look at the various filter effects with ACROS, look at this page. It has some really good side by side comparison. The green filter would be better for character portraits to flatten out the skin a bit. But for doughy babies, yellow is where it’s at! 😎

So we had some really neat chunky snow flakes the other day. I ran out early in the morning and nabbed a few macro photos while the wind was low. The trusty 105mm Nikkor and the stalwart Nikon D800 were the weapons of choice for this hunt – maximum resolution and resolving power!

It’s incredible to see the intricacies of frozen water up close like this. I have included a square cropped image here of the larger picture to see more of the detail.

It’s pretty wild stuff to see!

The “ball” images above here are frozen chokecherries. They are almost the same image, the only difference is lighting. On the darker blue image I lit the chokecherry with a flashlight in close and feathered a bit to give the image some shape and specular highlights – which we didn’t get with the flat cloudy ambient light. #Sparkle 🤩

In this block of images you can see the crops of the above. The creative genius of God on display for our viewing pleasure! 😎👍🙏

Every year on Halloween (Or, Reformation Day if you’re really cool), we host the “Hallowiener” at our house. Basically, we sell hotdogs and drink and give all the money to charity. Our neighbourhood comes together and donates all the food so that every dollar we raise goes to the cause. This year, we were very happy to help out our local health centre in their project to buy a new HandiVan. Our one night spooktacular event raised $1073.00 and we sold 160 hotdogs! We had several great donations to the cause that we are super thankful for.

Here’s a couple of snapshots really from the event. All with the FujiFilm X-PRO2 and the 23mm f/2 lens. I was cooking hotdogs all night so I didn’t really have time to take many photos. 😂 The halloween pumpkin shot at the top of the page was light with the candle inside the Jack O Lantern and a little handheld pocket flashlight (the S1 mini Baton from OLight) feathered just enough to add some shape. That little flashlight never leaves my pocket, I carry it everyday. It’s the most useful item ever. Highly recommend it! 😎
And I was able to make the presentation to the HandiVan project board today at the hospital. 😎👍

This is just a quick blog post showing how I was shooting some macro shots of my favourite cameras this evening.

This behind the scenes iPhone shot shows the exceedingly crude setup. Main light is an AlienBee 1600 through a gridded Photoflex soft box. I setup my home made scrim as a big reflector and did a simple blue gelled flash pointed at the back wall to give a bit of colour. Very simple setup with a decent result.

I also shot the good ol’ Nikon Df with an old 28mm manual focus lens from 19 diggity 5. I took more of a macro approach with this shot and used that same blue flash to add that hint of glancing colour to the shadow side. The blue sets it off just that extra little bit.

I shot the same kind of angle of the X-Pro2 but it doesn’t work as well to me. The X-Pro2 is more minimalistic in its design, lending to a more covert external appearance anyways (which I like). There’s just not as much going on for the accent light to bring attention too. Anyways, just a fun little shoot for something to do.

I was out for a little nature walk the other day. I took the D800 and my 105mm Nikkor macro lens which I haven’t shot in a long time. With macro, you need a good tripod to be locked down tight. And, you need cooperative subjects (read: not windy) that stay still. But this particular day I didn’t bring a tripod. In fact, I didn’t even focus. On purpose. With most macro and landscape photography, you want hyperfocal focus and even focus stacking to get a big, crisp, tack sharp photo as the end result. But what would happen if you did nature photography out of focus??

It creates a pretty wild, abstract, bokehlicious result! Give it a whirl! 😎👍